This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Professors fight back in information war

By Susan DelacourtOttawa Bureau

Fri., Feb. 11, 2011

OTTAWA – Two University of Ottawa professors are issuing a dare to the anonymous person who’s been trying to obtain their personal information in what they suspect is an attempt at political intimidation.

Amir Attaran and Errol Mendes, vocal critics of the federal Conservative government, say they will release all the information requested – even the data that they don’t have to disclose by law – if the person making the request comes forward and identifies himself or herself.

“We don’t have anything to hide,” said Mendes, saying that he hopes this is also true of the person making the requests, which were so unusually large and beyond the scope of the law that they set off alarm bells with the university.

People within the University of Ottawa’s administration know the identity of the person who sent in two massive freedom-of-information requests about Mendes and Attaran in January, requesting everything from employment records to expenses to teacher evaluations. Mendes and Attaran, as the law requires, have not been told the name of the requester, but they have suspicions about the motives. The two professors are often castigated by Conservatives as Liberal sympathizers, mainly for their repeated willingness to speak out on the issue of Canada’s handling of Afghan detainees.

Attaran says he’s now been informed that just one person made both requests. The university is standing by the professors’ rights to withhold much of the information requested, because it goes well beyond what the law sets out as fair game. Under Ontario’s freedom-of-information law, universities are not obliged to give out any personal data about their faculty, or release anything that could compromise their research or privacy.

Article Continued Below

“What I’m saying to that person is: ‘give your permission to the university to give me your identity and I will gladly get in touch and share information with you,’” Attaran said in an interview. “But I can’t do that if I don’t know who you are.”

The federal Conservative party has said, through spokesman Fred DeLorey, that it is not behind the file-hunting expedition. Dimitri Soudas, communications director for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said “the PMO did not file these freedom of information requests,” though he added: “There’s nothing wrong with filing such requests, media and all Canadians can do it under the law”

Others aren’t so sure – fearing that this is a new frontier in the backlash against Conservative-government critics, one that could threaten academic freedom.

Sharry Aiken, associate dean at Queen’s University’s law faculty, said she was the target of a massive FOI request in 2009 after she helped organize a conference on Middle East politics at York University. The conference became a flashpoint for controversy when the federal Conservative government made moves to withdraw funding for the gathering because of complaints that some of the speakers were anti-Israel.

A couple of months after the conference was over, Queen’s University was bombarded with a large request for all written and email correspondence between Aiken and a list of 80-90 people involved in the Middle East debate. The university deemed that the request fell outside the bounds of the law in that case too and after a couple of months, the request simply expired with no follow-up.

“It’s difficult, because normally I am on the bandwagon of transparency,” said Aiken. “But I think we cross a line when material that should properly be considered personal gets subject to politically driven requests of this nature.”

Aiken said she’s disturbed by the request that’s aimed at Mendes and Attaran. “In a sense I think people are manipulating the legislation for goals that it was never intended to do,” she said. “It was intended to be about ensuring accountability and transparency, not to be the basis of witch hunts against individuals whose politics may not be deemed to be within the approval of the government of the day.”

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com